Linda di Chamounix. For this, the first of the two operas he was to compose for the Kärntnertor in Vienna, Donizetti obviously lavished great attention to detail upon a score intended to please the most musically experienced audience in Europe. Linda is an opera of demi-caractère, contrasting contadini and aristocrats in an atmosphere of tenderness and ironic humor tinged with pathos. It is the last and best of Donizetti's semiserie. In this plot the buffo role is that of a Marchese who is an irrepressible advocate of the droit du seigneur in spite of his advanced years; his music has such charm and sparkle that he appears an integral part of the whole fabric rather than the tiresome intruder that such figures all too often seem to be. Unusually for a buffo in a semiseria, the Marchese is, after the leading tenor part, the longest male role in Linda.

Linda was written to an Italian libretto by Gaetano Rossi to serve as the highlight of the three-month Italian season at the Kärntnertor, the haute-saison of the Viennese musical year. It is difficult not to believe that Donizetti, eager to win acceptance and his court appointment from the Habsburgs, deliberately chose a plot that not only contained nothing to upset the most susceptible censor, but one which positively reinforced those virtues now regarded as Victorian. Linda is an opera of sentiment rather than emotion, a celebration of simple domestic virtues, and it results in the triumph of innocence.